Takeaway: If you can't change the way people are applying this, can we change the semantics? Possibly reword to "Not a valid question." You add a single char, but eliminate all confusion.

The vast majority of items I see closed as "not a real question" are indeed real questions. A google search [site:stackoverflow.com inurl:questions "closed as not a real question"] turns up many examples.

Ask yourself, "What is a question" and then attempt to defend the idea that it's acceptable to violate all reason and logic by suggesting interrogative statements aren't real questions. By definition, there can be no more realness to it.

Maybe I'm just being a bit pedantic, but I can't stand little things like this. Bad questions are just as much real questions as good ones.

I don't think this is a problem with SO's model, or the close option itself. I think this is a problem with the users (those doing the voting), and not being properly educated. After all, this close-reason has a purpose, for shutting down things like:

Unix is 40 years old. (August 1969 ) Happy birthday ! :)

That is a proper application of "not a real question."

Given that this appears to be an epidemic across the entire community, how exactly can it be remedied? How can any issue this wide-spread be remedied?

This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:

"The problem described here can no longer be reproduced. Changes to the system or to the circumstances affecting the asker have rendered it obsolete. If you encounter a similar problem, please post a new question." – AakashM, РСТȢѸФХѾЦЧШЩЪЫЬѢѤЮѦѪѨѬѠѺѮѰѲѴ, hims056, Martijn Pieters, Aziz Shaikh

3 Answers
3

Newer users seem to sometimes misunderstand what NARQ means, seeing it as an accusation that their honestly-asked question is somehow insincere, when really it just means that the question wasn't well-formed. I see this particularly on non- and less-technical sites, but search most meta sites and you'll find complaints about it.

This is not (just) a semantics issue as suggested in another answer; this is a user-experience issue. Regardless of what we meant, some of our users are misunderstanding.

I suggest changing "not a real question" to "unclear question". That fits well with the description that follows:

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form.

Most NARQs I've seen are genuine, poorly-formed questions from sincere askers; for trolls and other insincere askers we already have "not constructive". "Unclear question" invites the user to fix it; "not real" sounds like we've already given up on it (especially since newer users don't always understand that closing can be temporary).

You're looking to start a semantics argument. A ton of those are closed because they're something like, "My code is broked. Can you fix it?" with nothing else. There's no amount of editing that I can do that will fix that question. Ergo, it's not a real StackOverflow question. Close-->Not a real question. Done.

This is different from "not programming related," because it may very well be programming related. But the question may also be, "Why does my brother hate PHP?" Sure, it's a real question, but I don't know your brother, and I can't tell you why he hates PHP. That example borders with subjective and argumentative, but you get my point.

I feel like "not a real question" could be changed to, "Dude, WTF?" and we'd all be better off on the semantics arguments. Hell, maybe that's my suggestion:

I thought that's what "not X related" was for - to indicate that the question does not conform to the topic of the site.
–
Kyle CroninAug 25 '09 at 14:22

Well, take SO for instance. Not Programming related would be for a question that was clearly not programming related. Not a real question would be for a question that had to do with programming but was still not a valid question for the SO paradigm.
–
EBGreenAug 25 '09 at 14:26

2

"Not a real [site] question" would still be a bad name that would overlap off-topic questions.
–
JacobDec 30 '11 at 19:11